Rosalyn Schanzer's Witches: The Absolutely True Tale Of Disaster In Salem

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In the book Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, Rosalyn Schanzer describes what happens all because two girls fell ill. When Betty and Abigail started having fits, a doctor diagnosed them as bewitched. Almost immediately they accused the first witch, their slave Tituba. From there all the accusations started pouring out, Ann Putnam Jr., a friend of Betty and Abigail, became “afflicted” as well as multiple others, and soon the jails were overflowing. The first “witch” was hanged on June 10, and the last “witches/wizards” were hanged on September 22. The most likely reasons for the accusations were a thirst for revenge, boredom, and peer/parental pressure. The first reason for the accusations is that there was a thirst for revenge brewing in their malicious hearts. On page 47 Edward Putnam accused Rebecca Nurse, and on page 50 it states, “...really a way to take revenge against the Nurse family? Rebecca’s father had often battled with the Putnam family over …show more content…

Besides that,...” and it goes on to list another of the prodigious topics of conflict between the two families. In an article, “The quest for revenge can be seen as: 1) a motivation for aggression; 2) as a source of psychological distress; 3) as a key factor in the philosophical discussion of punishment and justice”(Paragraph 5 RotDfR) is noted about revenge and how it influences people. On a DBQ for the Salem Witch Trials it talks about hysterical convulsions which represents psychological distress. In the book Witches!... the violent

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